<p>Adobe has announced it will release a web edition of Photoshop. Yes, it will almost certainly be Flash based, not pure Ajax (technology aside, it’s the logical choice for the owner of the Flash platform!). Still, it’s big news for anyone involved in rich web apps…it wasn’t long ago when people would cite graphical editors as a typical example of what not to webify. Today, we already have several web-based image editors in production, and today’s news means we will soon have an official web edition of the best known desktop image editor.

Hoping to get a jump on Google and other competitors, Adobe Systems plans to release a hosted version of its popular Photoshop image-editing application within six months, the company’s chief executive said Tuesday. The online service is part of a larger move to introduce ad-supported online services to complement its existing products and broaden the company reach into the consumer market, Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen told CNET News.com.

Software publishers have often produced free or inexpensive “lite” editions. Now, it seems, Adobe’s plan is to use the web for a lite edition and continue using the desktop for the full package. It makes sense from the user’s perspective, as the web is an ideal, low-barrier, platform for trying out an app. On the other hand, you have to wonder about the engineering effort involved in maintaining dual editions – maybe this is where technologies like Adobe’s Apollo come in, to let you share code between desktop and web.

Chizen said Adobe laid the foundation for a hosted Photoshop product with Adobe Remix, a Web-based video-editing tool it offers through the PhotoBucket media-sharing site … Like Adobe Remix, the hosted Photoshop service is set to be free and marketed as an entry-level version of Adobe’s more sophisticated image-editing tools, including Photoshop and Photoshop Elements. Chizen envisions revenue from the Photoshop service coming from online advertising.

Adobe’s announcement comes a few days after Google introduced its premium Google Apps service, charging $50/user/yr for companies to use Google’s various Ajax tools, and Adobe is upfront about the impetus for this new initiative.

The hosted version of Photoshop is part of a bigger company strategy to introduce Internet-delivered services that complement its shrink-wrapped applications and head off likely competition from Google…”That is new (for Adobe). It’s something we are sensitive to because we are watching folks like Google do it in different categories, and we want to make sure that we are there before they are, in areas of our franchises,” Chizen said.

Can Dreamweaver etc be far behind? I’ve often wondered why the editors have focused pretty much exclusively on the rich-text angle, when I’m pretty sure coders maintaining client sites who switch to the “source code” view in FCKeditor would love to see a similar “widget” that would handle tag insight and tag completion.

I think Adobe makes a big challenge for itself, because if they intend to make fully functional version of Photoshop, they force themselves to have Flash Player which can handle the Layers, Filters, Masks, Huge Images and all stuff which makes original Photoshop so cool and heavyweight application.

So I think next step from Adobe is to upgrade the Flash Player to handle much more expensive calculations and to have overall greater performance, than current one.

Frankly, I just don’t get it. Elements is meant to be Photoshop “lite”, this proposed online version will be a “lite”, “lite” version?

Comment by Peter Lambert — March 13, 2007

I am a fan of Adobe Photoshop, the powerful image-editing software that graphic designers love. But I find myself using it less often than I used to. In fact, my usage has fallen off dramatically. The main reason is that I find I often don’t need all the firepower it has to offer.
Most of the time, I am just doing some simple cropping and resizing of photos. To use Photoshop, which takes (what feels like) a long time to load, seems like overkill. Besides, I often need to do some image editing while I am away from my main office computer, the only one of my three computers that even has Photoshop on it. And the reason most of my computers don’t have the program is that, at $649, it’s too expensive. Even the much cheaper and less powerful Photoshop Elements, at $99, feels like overkill most of the time.
I have been increasingly relying on free, Web-based photo editors that require no downloads and can be easily accessed just about anywhere in the world. They mostly work the same way: You go to the site, upload the photo you want to edit (or put in the photo’s URL if it’s already online somewhere) and then make the changes to the photo right away on the screen. You can then download the photo or e-mail it. They almost all allow you to crop, resize, adjust brightness and contrast, etc. Regards, Rabbit